The Third Day
by wneleh
Summary: On the third day, Lila died.


The Third Day  
>by Helen W.<p>

_Immediately after 'Love Kills'_

And on the third day, Lila died.

Three days? Not even; just over two. Forty-eight hours, plus a few. Fifty. Fifty-something.

Who gave a shit, anyway? If Blair started in on how he'd only known Lila for a week, plus fifty hours, Jim was going to let him have it. Blair'd just better watch what he said.

Not that Blair had been talking much. He'd been quiet all the way home, and was now puttering in the kitchen. Boiling water in the microwave, apparently. Tea made everything better, one of Sandburg's laws.

Blair was now handing him a cup of – something herbal. Jim didn't really care. Blair'd handed it to him wrong, though, because the tea'd sloshed and now Jim'd burned himself.

Actually, no. The water wasn't that hot; Blair'd rushed the microwaving.

"Might work better if you sat, Jim," Blair said, so Jim pulled out a chair and sank into it, to make Blair happy.

"You probably don't want to hear this right now," Blair began - and, shit, Blair was going to go there, was going to dare say that Lila dying was all for the best, that otherwise she'd be spending the rest of her life in jail. What she could probably testify to, it might be enough to keep her off death row, but that was it.

Instead, Blair was saying, "But that was an incredible shot. What was that, 150 yards? You had to have been correcting for your barrel, and the wind, and atmospheric distortion, and maybe even local gravity. I don't think anyone else could've done that."

"Didn't do any good," Jim ground out. "It was too late."

"It didn't look to me like you hesitated," Blair said. "Did you?"

Jim shook his head.

"You got that shot off even though your senses were whacked out. Right? Looked to me like they were, there, for a minute."

Jim had forgotten that – the teetering on the edge of losing his bearings, just like he had been for the past three days.

He had to get better at controlling himself, if his senses were going to flip out like that.

And if he couldn't have control – he at least had to be able to understand what his senses were telling him. You touched something hot, your sense of touch told you to jerk your hand away before your brain knew what it was doing. What he'd felt around Lila hadn't been 'Run away,' though – the opposite, mostly. (Okay, he'd stumbled out of that restaurant, but that had been about getting control, not about getting away from Lila.)

Maybe his senses had gone into overdrive so that he could detect threats to Lila. Had he missed something they were showing him? Because if all his senses had been trying to tell him was, 'Hey, asshole, that sort of puncture wound; guess where you saw a knife that could make it,' there had to have been a better way than by making is hearing and vision go off the rails.

No, it had to have been about danger – to Lila more than from Lila.

- - - - - -

"Dime for your thoughts?" Blair was now sitting also, stirring his own tea around.

"I couldn't have helped her at all, no matter what I'd done," Jim said.

"This afternoon?"

"No, since she came to Cascade. The clues just weren't there until it was too late."

"Oh."

When Blair didn't seem inclined to say anything more, Jim continued, "I mean, what's the purpose of these senses if they don't do anyone any good? I can't even say it's great they got a couple of assassins off the street, because someone's just going to take their place."

"You want to go down that road? Nothing's worth stopping, nobody's worth arresting?"

"Of course not."

"Is that why you got out of Vice?"

"No… I don't know." Maybe that **had** had something to do with it.

They sat in silence for another few moments, then Blair said, "Maybe you're thinking about this from the wrong direction. Maybe this isn't about you."

"Gee, thanks, Chief."

"No, think about it. What did Lila get out of running into you here, in Cascade, after all these years?"

"Death." Where the hell did Sandburg think he was going with this?

"Jim, she was dead the instant she decided to change her life. Scratch that, she was dead the instant she chose that life."

"She didn't choose it."

"The moment it chose her. Whatever. My point is, there was no way out of that life alive. But how did she die? Did her handler cut her throat? Did some target fight back?"

"You saw how she died."

"Yeah, I did, Jim, I saw her die a hero. You gave her that."

"The senses didn't do that."

"Jim, there's no separate 'you' and 'the senses.'"

"Don't feel like that sometimes," Jim said. But that was beside the point. "I could have saved her in Bali."

"Could you have? How, Jim? How?"

The image Jim hadn't even realized he'd had in his mind, of a little house in North Cascade, and Lila, in a wig and a new nose, driving around 2.5 kids in the family minivan, dissolved, leaving a residue of horror.

Blair must have seen something on Jim's face, because he asked, "What is it?"

"I just had a vision of Lila as a soccer mom."

Based on Blair's expression, he found the idea equally disquieting.

"But, you know, I still…" Jim paused. 'Loved' wasn't quite the word, no matter how he'd felt the day before. "She was special, Blair. I cared about her. Nothing changes that."

"I know, Jim," said Blair.

* * * THE END * * *

Hope you liked it! But I'd love to hear from you no matter what.


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